Sex in the Computer Age

From the moment virtual reality was invented, there was speculation about its erotic potential. Can computers be used to create the most exciting sexual partner ever dreamed of?

By
Susie Bright

Apr 22, 2015

As in most sexual encounters, you begin this one by slipping into something more comfortable—a diaphanous body stocking, say—and stepping into a room where the low lights and softly padded walls set the stage on which to enact your most outrageous fantasies. Let your imagination take over and feel yourself scale dizzyingly new erotic heights. But don't leave behind your 3-D glasses. Or your computer.

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You are entering the brave new world of virtual reality (VR to those who are already in the know)—a computer technology-in-the-making that is so advanced it almost defies imagining. Virtual reality makes use of the computer to create a simulated three-dimensional environment—one you experience as though it were absolutely real. The computer tricks the senses into accepting what is seen on monitors, heard on speakers, and felt through special clothing. It promptly notes your reactions and adjusts itself accordingly. Shift your head to the right, and the computer then alters the corresponding image on its screen, which allows you to view the right side of the imaginary environment.

None of this is tricky or farfetched to the researchers who have been working on virtual reality since it began to be developed in the late 1960s. These experts believe that their discovery will have boundless future applications for business, science, and the arts. NASA has been experimenting with virtual reality for years in an effort to build a pilotless plane. And the day may come when an architect will use computer-generated imagery to guide his client through a building that has yet to be built, or a doctor to rehearse an operation on an imaginary patient. Perhaps not surprisingly, from the moment its potential was first realized, people began speculating on its erotic applications as well. Could virtual reality be used to create the most exciting sexual partner ever dreamed of, to make the wildest fantasy come true?

Possibly, says Howard Rheingold, the author of Virtual Reality, the definitive book on the subject (Summit Books, 1991). Rheingold, who believes that sex between people will happen at a distance, through telephonic hookups, devotes an entire chapter to the future of simulated sec, which has been called "teledildonics"—the science of reaching out and touching someone.

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In Rheingold's scenario, subjects wear a body stocking that fits with the snug intimacy of a condom and contains on its inside thousands of tiny tactile detectors connected to small vibrators. These miniature devices are capable of receiving and transmitting the sense of touch. Subjects also don a pair of 3-D glasses, the lenses of which are actually two very small video screens and earphone speakers. Using a telephone, they are then ready to link their computer network to that of another person.

When you reach out to touch your partner, tactile sensors on your fingers feel the softness of flesh. At the same instant, tactile simulators on the other's arm are triggered to feel your touch. In the world of virtual reality, the tryst is conducted in cyberspace, a term coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson to describe the computer-generated, extra-physical world.

By using virtual reality potential partners will eventually be able to meet and place themselves in specific locations of their own design. But such a sci-fi sexual scenario is still decades away.

"People talk a lot about VR, but in fact it barely exists," says Richard Kadrey, a science fiction novelist and an editor of the Whole Earth Review. "It's still a very primitive technology." The VR paraphernalia available today is limited to a computerized headset—wraparound goggles with built-in video—and a touch-sensitive Lycra glove. In a simulated environment, as you reach for the image of, say, a teacup, "little studs in the glove enable you to feel the shape of the cup," Kadrey explains. "But that's as far as we've gotten." It is not yet possible to discern temperature, or, for that matter, surface tension—which would tell you if the cup was made of hard porcelain or spongy Styrofoam.

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That news is disappointing, especially in light of teledildonics's titillating promise. Indeed, at the moment it is hard to predict whether virtual reality will become the most mind-expanding communication device ever dreamed of, or a phenomenon as overrated as alchemy.

There are certainly people who want to believe. Rheingold's speculations about technoeroticism met with a deluge of calls from potential clients in search of the perfect sex machine. And R.U. Sirius, the perfectly earnest editor of Mondo 2000, a magazine devoted to computer technology and the human imagination, claims, "Hollywood's going nuts trying to figure out how to use it."

One film company has already found a way. In The Lawnmower Man, a movie based on a Stephen King short story scheduled for release this spring, virtual reality is used experimentally to transform the town fool in a super being. And yes, there's a virtual reality sex scene, complete with cyber-helmets and data suits.

The notion of a computer-simulated reality that includes sex has galvanized creative minds. Still, it's hard to explain the obsession with virtual sex, when the conventional kind is far from unavailable. A sexual experience, after all, is not like going to the moon. Anyone can play out a fantasy without the aid of a computer. So wherein lies the appeal of virtual sex? Rheingold suggests it may lie in helping to dispel some fears. Computer sex isn't likely to be fraught with the same anxieties that attend the real thing. "There is still a tremendous reservoir of repressed feeling in this country," Rheingold points out. "A lot of people don't have sex. They don't connect with other people." He suggests that for such timorous types, some kind of human contact, even one a step removed from conventional reality, is perhaps better than none at all.

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The fear of disease is, of course, yet another factor. In this dark age of AIDS, virtual reality does indeed give the concept of safe sex a whole new meaning.

But perhaps the most convincing argument for virtual sex is its potential for broadening one's sexual palette. In a VR erotic romp, "there would be no reason you have to be you," says Richard Kadrey. Kadrey predicts that someday we'll all be able to go out and buy VR software that makes us look like Madonna or Tom Cruise. "There's no particular reason for you to even be a person," he adds. "You could be a vibrator, you could be the bed. Ot the TV at the end of the bed."

Quite an imaginative scenario—but one that seems fairly unlikely. As Kadrey admits, the first VR sex programs are sure to be pretty banal. "They'll most likely be lame adolescent fantasies."

That the computer and the sexual entertainment industries are both widely acknowledged to be male-dominated arenas raises an obvious question. How will female desires and perspectives fit in with a virtual reality created by men?

Brenda Laurel, the co-founder of Telepresence Research, Inc., a VR research and development company in Palo Alto, California, can appreciate the question. "I know from years of experience working with computer guys that there are men in this business who are radically uncomfortable with their sexuality. I've had men tell me that one of the reasons they got into the business was to escape the social aspects of being make in America, and to escape women in particular."

Laurel claims that men see virtual reality as a clever way to avoid dealing with women, sex, and their own bodies. By contrast, "when women talk about virtual reality," she says, "they speak of taking the body and all its wonderful sense organs with them into another world—not leaving it slumped over a keyboard while the brain zips off down some network."

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In Laurel's experience, the people who shape any new medium in its early stages have an enormous impact on its ultimate capabilities. She cited computer games, the field she started out in in 1976. "They have become utterly devoted to an adolescent male demographic," she says. To keep virtual reality free from testosterone technomania, Laurel would like to see more women, and particularly artists, involved in development. "That way, we'll end up with a medium that has a flexible range of applications—and some kind of humanistic bias."

Not everyone, however, is sold on VR sex. "It will never work," says Honey Lee Cottrell, a photographer and filmmaker who specializes in erotica. "In my imagination I am able to control my confrontation with taboos. At certain points I jack up the volume, but then I can turn it down again. But if I were forced to confront these taboos full blast, they would close down my erotic response."

Cottrell's concern brings up a larger issue that has stirred debate in VR circles. Will our taboos, both social and moral, tag along with us as we enter a virtual environment? And if not, will illegal or unethical virtual sex be okay? For Howard Rheingold the possibility of immoral acts doesn't automatically invalidate RV. "Part of me has alarm bells going off about this artificial world we're buying into," he admits, "but part of me wants to say you can't really judge the 21st century by 20th century morality."

"The same reflex that might stop you from having a taboo experience in real life could also stop you in VR," Richard Kadrey suggests. And in any case, "the technology is never going to be what we think it will."

While the VR experience may never become "real" enough to raise questions of morality, it could become convincing enough to degrade the value of real-life encounters—which raises provocative questions. Given the choice one day, would you rather lose your virginity virtually or in reality? Experience virtual childbirth or real birth? And what about your looks?

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"The older I get, the more I sense a growing divergence between who I am and who I'd like to be," says Brenda Laurel. "VR is a demon in that it reinforces this schism. At the same time, VR could also be a savior if it gives me a new arena to use my body in ways that transcend its limitations," she says.

Part of the general uneasiness with VR may have to do with the fact that it suggests the brink of something we can hardly comprehend. Richard Kadrey likens it to the discovery of photography. "When man invented the camera, it was a mystical experience," he says. "The first time someone saw a photograph, it was like seeing God."

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